


In Which the Team Discovers Madeline Frost's Extracurricular Activities (Among Other Things)

by Sanguinifex (Eros_Scribens)



Category: Shadow Unit, The Lone Gunmen (TV), Vanity and Vexation (AU)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Humor, The wrong side of a casefic, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-25 15:43:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18264380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eros_Scribens/pseuds/Sanguinifex
Summary: In a case that's transhumanist from start to finish, the Shadow Unit team pairs up with Langly (alias Frank Arroway, post-JtS) from the X-Files/The Lone Gunmen, to take down a gamma who's killing people and hooking them up to public computer terminals. With two of their own network cryptids in play, it seems like it should be open-and-shut, but the stakes are raised when the rogue gamma targets the ACTF.





	1. Act 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's no such thing as a private IM conversation with two network cryptids around.

There was something powerfully weird happening in Oregon, and it was leaving a lot of bodies, so the WTF had convinced Madeline Frost to travel with them on the jet. They’d borrowed the gamma civilian consultant, too, despite his projectile aversion to corpses, because whatever the UNSUB was doing, they seemed to be using the internet to do it. So far, in various state university 24-hour computer labs, nine people had been found dead with computer cables jammed into their ears, making for some bafflingly Gibsonian corpse tableaux. The cause of death was still unknown, though presumably self-inflicted; the question was who or what was inducing these people to do this. Falkner had called Frost, and told her to pack her favorite scalpel.

DC to Oregon is a multi-hour flight. Reading the casefile twice over took only the first hour. After that, Chaz started a game of poker for sugar packets; most of the team played, but Hafidha knitted, Langly tried to remotely probe the university network (figuring that someone would stop him if he tried to trephine himself with an HDMI cable), and Frost just poked at her phone in silence.

About twenty minutes later, Langly spoke up. “Hey, Frost, do you think you could take that offline? It’s really distracting.”

Without looking up, Frost replied, “I know you can turn that ability off, Mr. Arroway. I’ve seen your file.”

“But I’m using it for something case-related!”

“I’m sure you can make it more selective, then. Your mythology has proven _quite_ adaptive.”

Langly muttered something about “untagged robot dick.” Hafidha raised an eyebrow, then squinted at something that didn’t seem to be there.

A second later, she burst out laughing. “Chaz, you have to see what Frost is writing.”

“What?”

“Check your phone.”

Chaz did. “You’re joking.”

“I’m really not.”

Langly, who could see the data transfer, added “Yeah, unfortunately she’s really not.”

“This _is_ Frost we’re talking about?”

“What on earth are you three doing?” asked Frost, finally looking up.

“Oh, I gave you a chance, but Hafs got curious, and now we’ve all seen your Transformers porn RP,” said Langly.

The other half of the cabin said “What?” and “No way,” and “I’m sorry, _what_ porn?”

Chaz passed his phone to Brady.

“That’s…actually pretty good,” said Brady, after half a minute. “I mean, I’m not into robots, but if I were into robots, I’d be into that.”

“That was supposed to be a private conversation,” said Frost, stiffly.

“You’re around not one, but _two_ computer gammas,” retorted Langly. “I can see everything that goes over the goddamn wifi. You might as well put it on a billboard. Also? Wasn’t me.”

“Sorry,” said Hafs. “I was just…well, it’s you.”

“She means it’s a bit surprising for someone who doesn’t even like physical contact,” translated Chaz, glaring a bit at Bug-Hafidha. He’d have a talk with her, later.

“Which is why I opt for a method that doesn’t include any contact, nor, in the conventional sense, human bodies. Are we done here?”

“Do you have an AO3?” asked Hafidha.

“MasterDroid314,” said Frost. “Because I am fairly sure you’d find it anyway, if I didn’t tell you. And don’t you dare do anything to it. I _will_ tell Dr. Ramachandran.”

“Huh. I have your series about Decepticon bathhouses bookmarked.”

“Thank you. Now, I would like to not be talked to.”

And that was that. And even Chaz couldn’t remember where the poker game had left off.


	2. Act 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frost finds something. Hafidha brings coffee.

As soon as Frost opened the cranium, she knew what had killed this person—probably all of these people. It also explained why she hadn’t been able to remove the phone charger from his ear, pre-incision. Threads of copper wire wove through the brain matter, like mold in blue cheese. No chance that this was a medical implant like Hafidha’s; those used titanium or stainless steel, never copper, because it always became corroded. This was, without doubt, anomalous, and Frost was already sorting through a list of plausible euphemisms to use in her report. Something like “metal proliferation possibly due to ultra-high current overloading.” It would look like she didn’t really know what had caused nine people to end up with spun copper in their brains, but then again, she was a pathologist and oncologist, not an electrician. Death had most likely occurred from massive brain trauma, electrocution, or seizures secondary to either. The lack of bruising on the corpses suggested one of the first two.

Someone knocked on the lab door. Frost looked up as Hafidha came in, carrying two tall paper cups of what one assumed to be coffee. Hafidha held out one of the cups, and Frost nodded towards a table that wasn’t covered by corpses or medical equipment, as she stripped her gloves off. Hafidha set down the cup, then wrapped both hands around her own, shivering in the slight chill of the autopsy lab, even though she was wearing more layers than Frost, who had been in it for over an hour already.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” Hafidha said. When Frost didn’t say anything, Hafidha continued, “On the airplane. With the Transformers porn thing. That was rude of me.”

“Did Charles make you apologize?” asked Frost.

“He did talk to me about it, but he didn’t make me do anything. I was a dick. This has been brought to my attention. I feel bad about it.”

“It was an uncomfortable few minutes,” admitted Frost, sipping the coffee—too sweet and milky, but probably black wouldn’t have tasted very good, here, and a gamma had mixed it, besides—“but I doubt it has devalued my reputation among the team, or caused them to disrespect me. If anything, the opposite. I already intimidated most of you—yes, I’m aware of how I come off to people, I just don’t feel it’s worth the effort to change that. I’m in a stable enough situation that I don’t need to. In fact, it’s mitigated sexism in the past, being seen as strange before being seen as female. I believe most of them see me as even more intimidating or inhuman, now, thanks to this little episode.”

“You were right, though—it was private, and I shouldn’t have. Not even to Chaz.”

“And I probably should have rescheduled the chat session when I found out that I was going to be working that day, even if I was going to have downtime on the flight. It was a touch unprofessional.”

“Because half the team playing sugar packet poker totally wasn’t.”

“I accept the apology. Do you feel better?”

“A little, but the point is, do you?”

“So long as you don’t mess with any of my accounts, I’m fine. Also, the UNSUB is definitely anomalous, and has no medical background. They appear to be causing death by causing wires to grow into the victims’ brains, originating from the cables found in their ears. I would guess that they are trying to connect the victims to the internet or a computer system, somehow.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell the others.”

“Go. You’re shivering.” Frost was pretty sure that if Hafidha weren’t black, she’d be turning blue. Gammas.

Hafidha nodded, then left.


	3. Act 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A preliminary profile-like address is delivered.

“So, the mythology involves computers, but the actual power appears to involve metal manipulation,” said Falkner. “I trust Frost will write up a formal report in a bit?”

“I think she still has a few more bodies to go through, but that’s what she found so far.”

“Still better than nothing,” muttered Brady. “The crime scenes have nothing. Public computer labs, so fingerprints, hairs, fibers, footprints are useless. Thanks to the cause of death, no splatter patterns, just a little bit of blood on the cables.”

Chaz made eye contact with Hafidha and tipped his head back. Together, they stepped away from the rest of the group. Hafs was pretty sure he was using his “nothing to see here” thing.

“How’d it go?” Chaz asked.

“Okay, I think. Either she’s not mad at me, or she’s planning to commit the perfect crime later.”

“That’s…good, I guess.” Chaz blinked. “I really thought she’d still be upset. I’d be.”

“She warned me about messing with her accounts, again, but mostly she said something about how it ‘reinforced her reputation with the team.’”

“Huh.” There was a pause.

“Chaz, could you show the locals your geographical profile?” called Falkner. Apparently, if Chaz had been jamming to avoid notice, he’d gone easy on the metaphorical pedal.

“Sure!” Someone had already set up a computer projector, and with a flick of Hafidha’s fingers, the diagram he’d made during the first hour of their flight here popped up on the screen. Chaz swallowed the last of his coffee (six creamers, half the available sugar packets) and picked up the laser pointer.

“There have been bodies on both campuses, but the highest density is on Corvallis. That’s the main campus, so that’s not surprising. However, it suggests that the UNSUB—unknown subject—may attend school or work there. Any student, faculty member, security guard, or facilities staff would have access to either of these locations. However, while students and faculty sometimes commute between campuses, and there is a regular shuttle that runs between the two, including every two hours at night, security and facilities only ever work on one campus. While that wouldn’t stop them from taking the shuttle, it would mean they’d be noticed if they did.”

“So we should ask the bus drivers if they noticed anyone unusual, out of place, on the shuttles, particularly at night, or anyone who behaved oddly,” said the police chief—Lorenzo, Chaz remembered. “Of course, it’s possible a bus driver _is_ the…ah, UNSUB.”

“Good thinking.” Chaz smiled at her. It looked…wrong, but not ungenuine. “Bus drivers have access to both campuses, time to commit the murder between night routes, and maybe even direct access to the computer labs—and even if they don’t, this time of year, it would be easy to get someone to let them in out of the weather. It’s even possible that such a gesture of hospitality could play a role in selecting the victims. However, we can’t rule out other people who have access to the computer labs on both campuses. At this point, we don’t really know much about the UNSUB beyond the connection to both campuses, except that they’re likely to be male—though this is by no means absolute—and they will have experienced some sort of stressful event, called a ‘trigger,’ shortly before the murders started. Unfortunately, in a college environment, that could be basically anyone.”

“There is one other thing,” said Falkner, and Chaz nodded and ceded the floor to her. “Based on some trace evidence our pathologist found on one of the bodies, we believe the UNSUB may have a type of metabolic syndrome that can cause extreme weight loss and violent delusions. Do not put out a public bulletin, as that might alert the UNSUB—again, if they suffer from this condition, they are likely to be extremely paranoid—but ask potential witnesses if they know anyone who has experienced significant weight loss, mental disturbances, and who has been keeping late hours. Without neglecting other possibilities, focus on persons of interest who have lost weight recently or who are extremely lean.”

Someone raised a hand.

“Yes, Officer…?”

“Detective Patil. So this metabolic thing, it sometimes doesn’t cause weight loss? When would that happen?”

“I’m not a doctor,” said Falkner, “but sometimes the sufferer could have another medical condition that hinders weight loss, like hypothyroid, or even mobility issues. Or, if the disease has a slower onset, the person might be able to adjust their diet fast enough to maintain a more average weight.”

“So we should look for people who have lost weight, but not rule out people who haven’t?”

“Yes, exactly, Detective Patil.”

“Okay, Agent Gates, you’re up for victimology.”

“Agent Gates hasn’t got very much yet,” said Hafidha. “Obviously, the victims are all college students. Race, gender, and ability don’t seem to matter. We don’t know much about sexuality yet, but I doubt the UNSUB is targeting based on that, either. More undergrads than graduate students, and no faculty or staff, but that may simply reflect who uses the labs; undergrads predominantly live on campus. We’re still combing through club membership data—student-led clubs don’t usually keep the best records—and we’re still obtaining families’ permission to access medical records, such as if some of the victims were in group therapy together, and class schedules. So, Brady, your turn.”

“I’m the crime scene specialist,” explained Brady. “In this case, as you know, the crime scenes aren’t particularly helpful. They took place in public spaces, so pretty much any kind of forensic evidence is contaminated. The only blood is the victims’, and only small amounts, from the insertion of computer cables, audio jacks or micro-USB, into their ears. The bodies have no defensive injuries or needle marks, so either the victims complied willingly for some reason, or they were incapacitated in a way that leaves no marks, such as an orally ingested poison or sedative. We should get the extended tox screens back sometime tomorrow or the next day.”

“What’s the cause of death?” asked someone—Brady didn’t see who.

“Who’s got Frost’s note?” Brady asked the team.

Hafidha thought the words onto the screen. “She didn’t give me anything on paper, yet; she was still working, but that’s what she told me,” she explained, loud enough for the room to hear.

The screen said, “CNS electrocution per vest. Nv.”

Hafidha continued. “That means the cables were used to deliver an extremely high-powered electric shock into the victims’ ears, which traveled along the nerves to the brain. So high-powered that it destroyed the inserted end of the cables to where they couldn’t be removed. We believe the shock was delivered from a non-recovered device, and then the other end of the cable was plugged into the computers after death as some form of staging.”

Like all the best lies, it was mostly truth.


	4. Act 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several case developments, and the gamma strikes again.

Chaz woke to a knock on the hotel room door. He opened it to find Hafidha, fully dressed.

“Case development?” he asked, sleepily.

“Yeah. Just found another body, or rather the report of it. Different jurisdiction—off-campus student, lived the next town over.”

“So this wasn’t in a computer lab?”

“No. It was the victim’s own bedroom.”

“So either the gamma was there, or he’s using something on the internet to convince? hypnotize? the victims into sticking the cables in their ears. I’ll go wake up Frank—”

Chaz turned, and stopped. Langly wasn’t in his bed.

 

Langly was not in the bathroom. Langly was not anywhere in the building. He wasn’t at the precinct, either. They even checked Frost’s laboratory—nothing. One of the cars was gone, though not the keys to it—Langly had probably hotwired it with his mind—and its GPS had been disabled.

“What if this gamma’s got a special thing for other gammas, like that one with the church and the fake AA program?” asked Brady, angrily, gesturing so hard with his coffee that some of it flew out the lid.

They’d all been considering it. The gamma Brady was referring to had hypnotized Chaz into giving one of his victims a means for suicide, and caused Hafidha to go AWOL and spend several months in Idlewood.

Chaz shook his head. “If this is related to the case, the gamma’s probably using the same means they’re using on their other victims. The nature of Frank’s anomalous presentation may make him more vulnerable to it, but on the other hand, it might give him an advantage. He may simply be the first of us to have stumbled onto whatever the gamma is using.”

“Well, then we have to find it, too,” said Falkner. “Brady, you take a look through Chaz and Frank’s hotel room and the security footage, then go to the new-to-us crime scene with Tan. Gates, try to figure out what Arroway was doing or looking at before he left, while Villette spots you. I’ll coordinate, liaise with local PD until Lau wakes up, because someone on the team has to sleep, and order a mammoth amount of Chinese food. Do you two want something that isn’t Chinese food?”

“Lots of starch, lots of frying oil, some protein and vegetables for flavor—sounds good,” said Chaz. “Shrimp fried rice, for me, no peanuts, and a big box of spring rolls.”

“Drunken noodles and another box of spring rolls, and some teriyaki chicken if they have it. Panda express does, and I saw one on campus,” said Hafidha, plugging a box of extra processors into her laptop.

“Ooh, drunken noodles,” said Chaz. “Get me a box of those, too.”

“If they have them,” said Falkner, writing it all down. Sometimes, she wondered what percentage of the WTF’s operating budget went to feeding its pet gammas. She’d never had the courage to actually look. Chaz usually handled that paperwork since, as he said, he was the reason it existed.

Falkner got out her phone and headed for the door. At the threshold, she paused. “Chaz? Don’t look at her screen, and don’t read her mind, either. Follow her if she says she’s going to the bathroom. If this gamma is using mind control, I don’t want you affected, and I need you to detect and stop her if she’s affected.”

“I’ve got the super-taser,” promised Chaz. He turned to Hafidha. “Sorry, Wabbit.”

“It’s good. And I’ve tuned the bug-zapper to something that will hopefully make me more resistant to suggestion.”

The door closed, and outside it, Chaz could just barely hear Falkner asking somebody about local Chinese places.

“It’s got to be visual or auditory, since it’s affecting alphas,” Chaz said.

Hafidha pursed her lips. “Do we actually know they’re all alphas?”

“First, what are the odds of nine gammas at two university campuses, in five weeks? Ten, counting the one that’s murdering them? Even Beale didn’t move that fast. Plus, at least three were overweight. So I suppose there’s a small chance one or two were gammas, but I think we can safely assume they’re not. Frank was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“If it’s auditory, you should wear earplugs. It could be using CPU fan speeds to deliver a message, even if you mechanically disable the speakers.”

“Got it, Odysseus.” Chaz opened the door, waved down Falkner, and asked her to get him some earplugs.

 

Arroway _had_  left the hotel alone, according to the security footage. He’d also left wearing pajamas and socks, without shoes, in winter, carrying only a laptop bag. Either the gamma UNSUB had gotten to him, or he’d had his own mental breakdown. Brady figured that, Frank being a gamma himself, the odds were about 80-20. Frank had seemed fairly stable earlier that night, but maybe the robot porn had pushed him over the edge. Still, Brady had gotten a good view of the license plate of the car Arroway had taken, and had convinced the locals to treat him as a missing person and put out an APB, in light of the footage, even though it hadn’t been 72 hours yet. Brady sent Tan to deal with that.

The “new” crime scene hadn’t yielded much, either. The apartment had been released and cleaned long before they had heard of it. It looked like any other cheap apartment. Surge-protector outlets—Brady wondered if the deceased tenant had installed them himself, on the sly. An odd detail, certainly, given the quoted rent on the sign in the window. Then again, almost anyone knew to have surge protectors on their computers.

From there, he drove to the morgue where the deceased was being kept, intending to take some pictures and scan the report to Frost, so she could see if she wanted to drive over there in the morning. The man had been dead for weeks, already; Frost’s opinion could wait a few hours, and would probably be better for the extra sleep.

That meant that the body had been found before any of the campus victims. Brady had sort of noticed that when the news came in, but he’d forgotten it when he’d learned that their _gamma civilian consultant_ (seriously, not a decision he would have made, even though Frank seemed like a decent enough guy) had gone missing. This was possibly the very first victim. Brady decided he’d do more than just take photos; he’d look at the body himself, now. There had to be something to learn from comparing the first victim to the later victims. Any evolution could be a key to mythology.

 

Chaz had walked Hafidha to the bathroom three times, refilled her coffee four times, and asked Falkner to order more takeout one time. The sun was coming up, and he was beginning to think that Hafidha wouldn’t find anything. The earplugs blocked the noise of the CPU fans, just like they were supposed to, and Chaz found himself about to fall asleep.

Suddenly, something did break through the foam. Chaz startled awake, blinking. Hafidha had closed her laptop and flung it across the room, apparently heedless of the cables plugged into it, since the auxiliary CPU box was halfway across the room—she was never like this, even on bad days, she never mishandled her tech—and Hafidha herself was heaving over a paper takeout bag. Chaz tore the earplugs out and went to her.

“Hafs?”

“I’m fine,” gasped Hafidha. “I feel like my frontal lobe is about to explosively exit my skull, but I’m fine. I found it. I think I’m still going to live.”

“No urges to go all Piioniic Helmsman?”

“Might feature into my next Bug-generated self-destructive episode, but…no. Not now.”

“What was it?”

“A blog post. Subliminal messaging through light pulses and a specific CPU frequency, plus…something gamma. Fnords everywhere. I tried to take a closer look, and it almost got me. Remind me to put my bug zapper back to normal, in a minute, speaking of that. It should be fine, if it’s printed. I sent it to the nearest wireless printer in the building, before I closed the lid.”

“You did good,” said Chaz, rubbing her back. “We should get you more food.”

“I didn’t actually throw up,” said Hafidha. “I was just afraid I might. Fucked up my center of balance for a good minute.”

“Still, food. IHOP? It’s not going to be my cooking, but they’re probably open by now.”

“Yeah. I want strawberry waffles.”

 

Brady studied the police report and the autopsy again. And again. The deceased had stopped attending work days before the ME-determined time of death; he’d been slated to have a nearly full-time schedule during fall break. They’d also noted severe dehydration; while they had determined “foreign object lodged in brain” as the cause of death, the dehydration looked like it could well have been fatal on its own. There was metal all through the body, labeled “self-inflicted injuries.” The ME noted old scars on his head and torso.

Brian Shaeffer’s body had been found at the end of fall break, when his roommate had come back from visiting family. He had been dead for at least three days. The later victims had all been discovered more quickly. Maybe that explained the change—maybe the UNSUB wanted them found more quickly.

 

“It’s a transhumanist blog,” said Hafidha, as Falkner read the printed blog post. “It’s how the gamma is luring his victims in. He probably thinks it’s hypnosis or subliminal messaging, but it’s actually some kind of anomalous power based on those concepts.”

They hadn’t made it to IHOP yet. Instead, Hafidha was eating jam packets from the station breakroom. Apparently, the locals didn’t like Concord Grape or Olde English Marmalade. She saw Lau checking in at the front desk, and waved her over.

Chaz peered over Falkner’s shoulder. “Wow. ‘Flesh is a prison. We are slaves to food, to bathroom lines, to our own gut bacteria. Slaves to chemical neurotransmitters, to everything that changes them without our consent. We only do not realize our disgusting state because we have known nothing else. But we can ascend.’ And then there’s…a how-to.”

“And like twenty paragraphs more of that before that,” said Falkner.

Hafidha put down the mini-tub of Mixed Berry she’d been trying to open. “We have to find Frank. Now. I think I might know where he went.”


	5. Act 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will they find Langly in time?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been to OSU. I only know what the campuses are called because Wikipedia. It's probably inaccurate, and for the purposes of this story, I doubt it matters!

“The university server room, at Corvallis?” asked Brady, into his cellphone.

“It’s where I’d go,” said Hafidha. “If I were trying to upload myself, I’d need a lot of cloud storage and a lot of RAM. The university has that, and it’s also where the previous victims killed themselves—I think we can safely say that, at this point. We’ll make up something about transhumanist cult suicides, and it won’t even be lies, because minus the gamma, that’s about what this is.”  
“Trans-what?” asked Brady, turning up his phone volume and sticking a finger into his other ear. Curse concrete basements. “Is this some kind of gender thing?”

“No. Cyborgs. Like Frost’s dirty little secret.”

“I thought that was robots.”

“Same difference, pretty much. You can google it, after we save Frank. Get the hell over to Corvallis.” Hafidha hung up.

 

This side of town mostly didn’t have rush hour, and that was fortunate, because Chaz was maxing out the speedometer on the borrowed police car. Hafidha downloaded the Google Maps for Corvallis into her head and fed the images to Chaz, and he sped towards the university with sirens on, at one point going the wrong way down a one-way road for nearly two miles. What should have been a twenty-minute drive took seven minutes and forty-one seconds.

Hafidha must have also downloaded a campus map, because she took off running almost before Chaz had parked, yelling something about the computer science building. Chaz ran after her, passing her a few hundred feet before the doors. The keycard panel hung crooked, smoking.

“Frank’s been here,” Chaz yelled, trying the door. It was open. He walked inside, realized he had absolutely no idea where he was going, and waited for Hafs to catch up. Hopefully, twenty-three point five seconds wasn’t going to be too long a delay.

“Turn left, the stairs at the end, go down two floors, right, third door,” gasped Hafidha, still running, when she saw Chaz standing there. Once more, Chaz followed.

The server room was dark, filled with humming, blinking indicator lights and tall stacks of PC cases. Chaz couldn’t find the lightswitch. This held all the cloud storage for both campuses and the e-learning program. If they were right, Langly was in here somewhere—but where? Hafidha started to get out her flashlight, but Chaz stopped her: if Langly was still in here, and still under the control of the gamma, he might run or turn hostile if he saw them coming.

Tasers drawn, though they suspected it wouldn’t do much to Langly given his powers, Chaz and Hafidha cleared the rows of servers. At the back, they spotted a lamp. Langly was sitting on the floor, still in his pajamas, connecting some wires together with pliers. Chaz lowered his taser. Hafidha did not.

“Hey, Frank,” said Chaz, trying to sound casual. “What’re you making?”

Langly looked up. “I found a good idea on this blog—I was checking all the sites accessed by the murdered users. Anyway, this guy has some really good ideas about digital consciousness, but his interface is really rudimentary. I decided to make some improvements, based on some stuff I saw nearly 20 years ago, but updated for modern materials and bandwidth. Hopefully, this time won’t involve giant evil space lasers.”

“That’s really cool, Frank, uploading your consciousness, but doesn’t that sound like something you should do under medical supervision?”

Langly shuddered. “Frost is scary. And she writes really mechanically terrible porn. I doubt she can tell an HDMI cable from an Ethernet cable, and neither is supposed to leak ‘mechfluid,’ whatever that is.”

“Well, let me take a look at it, then,” offered Hafidha.

“Oh, hi, Hafs! You’re here, too. Didn’t see you. Sure, take a look. See, this plate interfaces with the frontal lobe, and this one goes to the temporal lobe, and it really decreases the invasiveness associated with the uplink procedure….”

Hafidha  managed to keep Langly talking about mechanical details until Frost, Brady, and Tan found the server room, nineteen minutes and twenty-three seconds later. Frost had prepared a sedative injection, but Brady simply asked if Frank was hungry.

Was Frank ever.

“Of course, that will all be irrelevant once I complete the upload process, but it can take up to 48 hours, so eating is probably a good idea beforehand. Nobody mess with that headset, okay?”

 

Food was, of course, strictly forbidden in the server room, so it was pretty easy to convince Langly to delay his ascension for a couple hours and go to IHOP.

Over breakfast, Langly explained his version of reality. “So, no way am I doing this without a background check on the guy. I mean, he could just be trying to put malware in my brain. So, I go through the account and I trace the email address this guy uses. It’s a university account, so I don’t even have to read his emails. He’s a computer science postgrad at OSU, Brian something, but the name that matters is ‘Aporobosis.’ Neat play on words. I should tell Reid about it.”

Brady had tried to swallow a mouthful of eggs much too fast a few seconds ago, and had finally stopped coughing into his napkin. “Wait, did you say ‘Brian’? Brian what?”

“Schiff or Schafe or something. Why?”

“Is it ‘Schaeffer?’”

“Yeah, that’s it!”

“He’s dead. Whatever he discovered, it didn’t work.”

Langly looked puzzled. “What? No, he’s not. I talked to him just a couple hours ago!”

“Maybe it’s identity theft, then. I saw the body, Frank. He’s been dead for three weeks.”

“Oh! That explains it. He uploaded. By an irreparably invasive method, but again, I think I’ve fixed that. Once I get it done, I’ll post a comment about it. He’s living in the OSU cloud storage, though he wants to establish some backups elsewhere. I think I can help him with that; he’s good at what he does, but he’s not a hacker. The problem is access. Antivirus programs don’t know what the shit to do with human uploads.”

“So, he’s only on the OSU servers?” asked Hafidha.

“Yeah,” said Langly, folding an entire waffle into his mouth.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” said Hafidha. “Too much coffee too fast.” A few seconds later, Brady’s phone buzzed. Not a text, but a Google doc. It said, _I’m actually calling Falkner. Don’t tell Frank. Hopefully he’s too busy trying not to choke on that waffle to catch this._

This IHOP was not a new building, and pretty soon Hafidha found its landline. While Langly could actually still hack that, he had no reason to—in her experience, other people’s advance breakfast orders were exactly what he usually tried to block out. She flashed her badge, and the manager let her make a call—“I’m worried my cell might be tapped” wasn’t even a lie. She spoofed her own caller ID into the wire, anyway.

Falkner answered almost immediately. “Oh thank goodness. How’s Frank?”

“Still all hypno-whatever, but so far we haven’t had to tranq him. He’s both suggestible and hungry, so we got him to come to IHOP. I’m using their landline. He thinks I’m in the bathroom, so I don’t have much time. Listen, you need to tell OSU to scrub all their servers and cloud storage and any hard drives over 3 terabytes that have ever connected to the university network. Make up something about malware and hypnosis. That’s pretty much what happened. The gamma is dead, he’s the guy we found out about last night, and he’s living as a cyberghost on the OSU cloud. Langly says he doesn’t have any backups yet, because fortunately ghost dude is a shitty hacker.”

“Wow.” said Falkner. “Noted.”

“I can take down the hypno-blog myself, and safely, but OSU should at least get the chance to do this themselves, so they can recover some of their files. This guy is still dangerous. Gotta go now. Thanks.”

“Be safe.” Falkner hung up.


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the flight back home, the team reflects.

“How’re you holding up?” Brady asked Langly, handing him a cup of syrupy-sweet airplane coffee. The gamma was wrapped in a blanket, curled up between the other two gammas, whom he didn’t seem to want to let go of.

“Been worse,” said Langly. “Can I just say, even when you thought you’d seen all the shitty permutations of mindrape, there’s always a shittier one out there just waiting to happen?”

“A gamma managed to turn me straight for 24 hours, once,” said Brady.

“Texas,” said Chaz, and shuddered.

“The fucking Bug itself,” said Hafidha.

“I got whammied with something experimental and probably classified at DEFCON one year, back in the nineties, and almost got convinced to shoot a bunch of people. Me. The guy who barfs at corpses.” Langly shook his head. “I was lucky; someone I knew got convinced to jump under a bus. I saw Mulder trip on a fear gas overdose, and got a decent dose of it myself, but that was closer to a panic attack than _seeing things_ , like he was, and I saw the aftermath of him and Scully almost getting vored by a psychedelic mushroom. Yes, the _mushroom_ tried to ingest _them_. Hell, one of the first times I met Scully, it was a case where some kind of bug spray was making people hallucinate commands coming from digital displays. Really, I don’t think enough people appreciate how sane those two were in spite of what they went through. But yeah, this is new. And it hit me with something pretty close to what I’d wanted, for years. I don’t know what to do with it. I feel like I’m signing off on a murder, and I still hate Apple-Proboscis for doing that to me.”

“We can’t exactly take a server farm to Idlewood,” reminded Hafidha. “And someone destroyed my Faraday cage, anyway.”

Langly doubted a Faraday cage could still hold her, at this point, and knew it wouldn’t hold himself, but he had just the sense not to say that in front of the others.

“So, what was the hypnotherapy like?” asked Brady. “My brain’s trying to tell me it’s satanic, thank you, Pentecostal upbringing, and I keep trying to hit my brain with a metaphorical newspaper.”

Langly shrugged. “I was already kind of hypnotized. The therapist just got me to trust her, then woke me up. And then I realized what I’d almost given up, and who, and it really sucked.”

“No more urges to stab yourself with audio jacks?” asked Hafidha. Chaz glared at her.

Langly  shuddered. “I’ll have nightmares for weeks, if not the rest of my life, but no. Mostly.”

Everyone stayed quiet for several minutes, fiddling with suit buttons or loose bits of the armrests, as Langly huddled deeper into the blankets and drank his coffee.

“He thought he was offering them immortality,” said Brady, breaking the silence. “What if he was? Schaeffer had tons more metal in him than the others—it was like it was growing. Frost thinks it was. Were any of them really dead, even physically, until we unplugged them from the terminals?”

The rest of the flight home was nearly silent, except for the sound of Frost tapping on her phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every incident referenced by the characters did, in fact, happen in their respective canons.
> 
> Brady: SU 3.03 "Always Crashing in the Same Car"  
> Chaz: SU 1.08 "Refining Fire"  
> Hafidha: SU 2.08 "Not Alone" and 3.02 "The Unicorn Evils," plus some shorts and continuing plot throughout S#  
> Langly: XF S6E20 "Three of a Kind," S5E3 "Unusual Suspects," S6E21 "Field Trip," S2E3 "Blood"
> 
> It would be really humorous to imagine what Chaz and Hafidha did to keep Langly busy between the IHOP and deprogramming him, but I didn't want to write it right now. They probably told him that OSU had a malware problem, to keep him off its network. OSU probably didn't cooperate with the deletion order, and they can't just leave Shaeffer in there because he could make another hypno lure site any time, so Langly and Hafidha are going to have to cook up some amazing malware to shut the place down, or maybe blame it on terrorists and/or the NSA.


End file.
